Cost of Recycling Municipal Solid Waste With and Without a Concurrent Beverage Container Deposit Law

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the literature on the effect of beverage container deposit legislation (BCDL) on the cost and amount of the household portion of municipal solid waste recycled. A U.S. General Accounting Office report concluded that dual systems cost more than either alone and that the combination diverts a greater amount of solid waste from landfills, which is supported by this analysis. However, the report's conclusion that a dual system becomes more cost-effective as landfill disposal costs increase cannot be supported over reasonable ranges of the marginal savings from not having to dispose of recycled materials. The cost of recycling is higher in communities with dual systems. Recycling programs without BCDL divert as much or more waste from disposal than with BCDL.     

CURRENT PROBLEMS IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS: A REVIEW OF MACROECONOMIC AND MICROECONOMIC APPROACHES

Reviewing: R. Dornbusch, Dollars, Debts and Deficits, M.I.T.Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986; and P. R. Krugman (ed.), StrategicTrade Policy and the New International Economics, M.I.T. Press,Cambridge, Mass., 1987     

The Impact of Deregulation and Financial Innovation on Consumers: The Case of the Mortgage Market

We develop a technique to assess the impact of changes in mortgage markets on households, exploiting an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: The higher a household's expected future income, the higher its desired consumption, ceteris paribus. With perfect credit markets, desired consumption matches actual consumption and current spending forecasts future income. Because credit market imperfections mute this effect, the extent to which house spending predicts future income measures the "imperfectness" of mortgage markets. Using micro-data, we find that since the early 1980s, mortgage markets have become less imperfect in this sense, and securitization has played an important role.     

TIME UNDER AUTOCRATIC RULE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

We investigate how the length of time a country's regime was autocratic between 1920 and 2000 is correlated with economic growth and per capita income. We find that the longer a country was within an autocracy, the lower is the country's economic performance, even after controlling for other factors. We also find the length of time a country is not autocratic is positively related to growth and income. We claim this evidence is consistent with the thesis that one reason why some countries have had difficulty adjusting to life after autocracy is that the human and social capital necessary to make markets “work” eroded under autocratic regimes and take time to develop afterward. (JEL O17, O43, P0)